PI Manager for Users

1. Old plugins install with their own installer somewhere.
2. Old plugins find that somewhere as before.
3. OpenCPN loads the old plugins like before
4. Old plugins are uninstalled just as before.
5. PI Installer can install new plugins and puts them elsewhere
6. PI Installer's new plugins use GetPluginDataDir and must not care where elsewhere is.
7. PI Installer's use tarballs and metadata.xml for installation.

PI Installer after selection of “+”

PI Installer downloading after selection of “Upload” or “Reinstall”

PI Installer download completed and plugin installed

PI Installer incompatible notice

PI Installer selection of Catalogs

Operation of plugins may have to be changed for User “ease out of the box” because right now EG: for Windows)

Plugin Packages (now)

• Installation Directory: C:/ProgramFiles (x86)/OpenCPN [version for parallel installations]/plugins/
• User writable Data directory: %ProgramData%/OpenCPN/plugins/…

Plugin Manager (future)

• Installation Directory: %LOCALAPPDATADIR%/OpenCPN/plugins/ (different)
• User writable Data directory: %ProgramData%/OpenCPN/plugins/… (the same)

This difference may create some issues initially “out of the box”. Hopefully most plugins used standard environment variables or relative paths. Some plugins may have to be tweeked to improve the initial installation experience.